After all that has happened, the Left still ignores the threat of Islamism, appeasing militant Muslims just as Chamberlain and Lindberg placated Hitler. The appeasers are sticking their heads in the sand not because of noble sentiments. In reality, they are afraid, very afraid, of being blown up, and their fear overwhelms all sense of rationality.

Tom Fox went to Iraq to grovel before Iraq’s ultra-violent Islamist “insurgents,” seeking to convince them to give up a “cause” that they have no intention of ever abandoning. Fox could have done a cursory review of the current state of Islamism using a Google search before going to Iraq, but he went anyway. One may argue that he was brave — not afraid — but he was, in truth, utterly misguided and foolish.

Islamists massacred 344 civilians — half of them children — in Beslan, North Ossetia. They killed 62 in Delhi, India; murdered 50+ in Turkey; and have killed tens of thousands in Indonesia, Algeria, and Nigeria. Al-Qaeda slaughtered 88 innocent Egyptians last July 23.

But the enemy is not just “terrorism,” some generic evil. This vagueness blurs the strategy. The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific. It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism — especially the al Qaeda network, its affiliates, and its ideology.

It has become increasing evident to me that after stripping away all the rationales for the US invasion of Iraq, what is left is the reality that the current U.S. Administration felt compelled to invade from a basis of hate.

So Fox went to Iraq to fight supposed American hate. But he ended up getting killed by people (Islamists) he presupposed as “victims” without hate, yet who are driven first and foremost by hatred. What an awful irony and what foolish appeasement.